3.11.2017

Something is happening quickly in the camera market. It's either good or evil depending on your point of view. Or your career trajectory. But it is happening nonetheless. Still cameras are tranforming (like Optimus Prime) from dedicated still photography devices into nearly full-fledged video recording devices. And the trend seems to be accelerating and punishing the laggards in the field while rewarding video-centric early adopters.

It's easy to say that it all started with the Nikon D90 or the Canon 5D mk2 but the reality is that smaller bridge cameras incorporated video modes long before those modes made the jump up to interchangeable lens, large sensor, still cameras. Doesn't matter when it started though, the trend is here and it's moving quicker and quicker; and may determine whether your favorite camera model comes to market and succeeds, across international lines.

This is very evident in the progression of Olympus and Panasonic cameras. The GH5, which will hit the market in a couple of weeks, is much more of a video production camera than a still camera (although the two camps are in no way mutually exclusive). It offers more flexible menu options and capture file types for video than many dedicated video cameras at multiples of its price. It will soon be one of the very few consumer cameras to

OMG. A post that's entirely about the still photography characteristics of a new camera. No video anywhere in sight!!!

The Panasonic fz2500 hit the studio on Weds. and it wasn't until Friday morning that I actually had time to walk around downtown Austin and take some images with it. I grabbed an extra battery before I left the house and made all the fundamental settings to the camera, including turning down the default noise reduction by two clicks. I never seem to mind uniform noise in my images nearly as much as I do obvious smoothing from noise reduction. I'm guessing it's subjective.

The first thing I noticed was just how much difference only a couple increments of magnification make in a viewfinder. I thought the difference between .70x and .74x would be no big deal but it makes the finder brighter and more comfortable to compose in than the previous, fz1000 or any of the Sony RX10 variants.

I found myself using the longer end of the zoom lens. Seems like my "go-to" approach to these super zoom cameras. All the images were shot in raw and converted to Jpegs in Lightroom. I think I got a little overzealous with the introduction of magenta into my color correction mix. I'll watch out for that in the future.